Samsung researching brain-controlled devices

Samsung is reportedly spending R&D money on developings ways to control a phone by the human brain.

According to MIT Technology Review, Samsung’s Emerging Technology Lab is collaborating with Roozbeh Jafari, assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Texas, Dallas, on the early-stage research.

This involves placing a cap “studded with EEG-monitoring electrodes” atop the head of a convenient person, who then concentrates on an onscreen icon blinking at a particular rate. If the person concentrates hard enough, they can launch and interact with software.

While Samsung indicated that mind-controlled mobile devices are quite a way off, if they ever appear in a market-ready form at all, it could be the next step in controlling a mobile gadget.

After all, a fifteen years ago they would say that you were mad if you thought it possible to use voice, touch, gesture, and eye movement to control and interact with mobile devices.

Brain research has been experimenting with lots of potentially new devises lately. Researchers at Duke University, the Edmond and Lila Safra International Institute for Neuroscience of Natal in Brazil, and the Neoscience Research Institute at Beijing’s Peking University implanted rats with sets of micro-electrodes in the brains. This allowed for the real-time transfer of what the researchers termed “behaviourally meaningful sensorimotor information” between two rats separated by thousands of miles.

This means that multiple brains could be linked into a “net” that could facilitate the exchange of information over long distances.